In addition to the above companies, Sojourner Securities is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Pathfinder Capital and is a FINRA/SEC-registered broker/dealer.

Mr. Friddle and Mr. Gebhardt established the Pathfinder group of companies following 20+ years (each) of experience in the corporate and investment banking industry. Prior employment included senior level and management positions with Banc of America Securities, J.P. Morgan, Merrill Lynch, Wachovia (First Union), and UBS.

At Pathfinder we engage in transactions where our combined and specialized expertise creates value for clients well above that provided by other advisory alternatives. Our firm is comprised of highly experienced professionals with specialized product expertise and extensive relationships throughout the lender and investor communities. Our professionals focus exclusively on delivering optimal private capital alternatives to our clients. We maintain regular dialogues with a large universe of financing sources, including diversified financial institutions, well-known companies in the oil and gas, consumer products, transportation, healthcare, and industrial sectors (among others) as well as finance companies, hedge funds, institutional fund managers, mezzanine funds, and other alternative sources of capital. We remain in continuous and close contact to the capital markets and our knowledge of trends and issues allows us to provide realistic and up-to-date advice to clients.

Our backgrounds encompass more than three decades of relevant securities, investor, asset-backed, energy tax credit, tax, legal and transactional experience in the energy, power and renewables sectors. As a result, and since Pathfinder Capital was founded, we have raised more than $12.0 billion in capital for clients from a variety of sources. Many of these capital providers had not invested in the energy sector until we brought our expertise to the transaction identification, diligence and review process. We have a well-earned reputation for an ability to successfully deliver innovative structures and capital solutions that match the individual needs of each client. In addition, we believe that this expertise must be delivered on an undiluted basis - meaning that clients interact exclusively with our principals.

Just a few of the critical areas of knowledge and significant areas of experience covered by our professionals include:

merger, acquisition and corporate finance advisory solutions;

federal tax credits for energy projects (usage, purchase structures);

partnership structures for investment purposes;

securities issued by Special Purpose Entities (SPEs);

the accounting standards and practices for utilities, including standards for prudence and cost recoverability, reserve accounting, depreciation, and taxation;

rating agency interaction;

capital raising issues for energy projects, including wind and solar projects by and on behalf of non-energy investors, and tax and accounting issues;

capital raising issues in the regulated utility environment and interaction with and testimony for public utility commissions; and

Renewable Energy

Pathfinder Renewables develops assignments in the dynamic and growing renewable and clean energy sectors. The firm advises on and raises capital on behalf of select project developers and sponsors and works with investors looking to enter or further existing investment in the renewables space. The Pathfinder group specializes in sourcing capital from "non-traditional" sources for its clients and this expertise is carried over to Pathfinder Renewables. Projects completed or under engagement include opportunities in the wind, solar, biomass, geothermal and refined coal sectors.

Our principals are investment bankers and legal professionals well-grounded in the energy & power sector with strong tax backgrounds. The only transactions we undertake are energy and energy-related assignments. We are energy bankers first and potential investors clearly know the difference.

We have substantial backgrounds advising clients on capital raising- including "tax equity", monetization strategies, company valuation, debt issuance, asset-backed transactions, hybrid security issuance, and similar complex structured financings to achieve specific balance sheet and income statement results. This experience was developed from multiple sides of the market as securities products specialists, client managers and legal/tax professionals with major firms.

Over the course of our careers, we have executed numerous transactions with a large number of corporate and institutional names. Regardless of our affiliated corporate identity, many of those same companies still look to us as individuals for well-structured and appropriately-priced transactions.

Our investor reach is leveraged for our clients' benefit and we expect to remain creatively involved in all aspects of the transaction process from structuring to diligence to documents/deal negotiation.

News

Selected Transactions

(click item for more details)

News - Current

The links below guide visitors to 2009-2015 news regarding Pathfinder Capital, topical research undertaken by our principals, commentary by the firm as well as to selected non-affiliated sites that contain information we beleive to be of current value.

Team

Mr. Friddle is a co-founder and principal of Pathfinder Capital Advisors, LLC and its wholly-owned subsidiary, Sojourner Securities, LLC, (a FINRA and SEC-registered broker/dealer) as well as affiliate Pathfinder Renewables LLC. Mr. Friddle is responsible for client development in the firm's utility, oil & gas, and alternative/renewables energy practices. He is also one of the firm's chief investment strategists and handles firm regulatory matters in regards to FINRA/SEC. At Pathfinder Capital (and its affiliates) Mr. Friddle has raised nearly $12.0 billion in capital for numerous energy projects.

Mr. Friddle was one of the key developer's of Pathfinder Capital's landmark engagement as the exclusive financial advisor to the Louisiana Public Service Commission (LPSC). Pathfinder Capital advised the LPSC on the structuring, marketing and pricing of approximately $1.2 billion of securitized ratepayer-backed bonds (also known as rate reduction or transition bonds) on behalf of Cleco Power LLC, Entergy Gulf States Inc., and Entergy Louisiana Inc. These three transactions were completed during 2008. Given the success of the 2008 engagement, Pathfinder was asked to reprise its role for a 2010 series of ratepayer-backed bonds for over $700 million.

Mr. Friddle has been actively involved in corporate and investment banking, both domestically and internationally, for the past 24 years. Prior to establishing Pathfinder Capital Advisors, Mr. Friddle was a Managing Director with Banc of America Securities' Structured Capital Markets group and responsible for structuring and delivering complex funding strategies to the bank's large-cap client base. Representative transactions were based on sophisticated applications of balance sheet and tax-advantaged drivers and required structuring among a host of instruments including preferred securities, mezzanine debt, asset-backed securities, privately-held debt and equity, and other securities instruments. Much of his advisory work was geared towards off/on-balance sheet capital raising for the bank's energy and power clients.

Mr. Friddle joined NationsBank (today Banc of America Securities) in 1992 as a Senior Vice President responsible for the International Corporate Finance team. He had direct client responsibility for many of the bank's largest European and Canadian clients and their U.S. subsidiaries. His team successfully developed lead transactional roles for the bank involving public/private debt, derivatives and other risk management tools, syndicated debt and acquisition finance. His many personal successes included a number of first-ever U.S. capital markets issues for this client base.

Before joining NationsBank, Mr. Friddle was employed for ten years with First Union National Bank (now Wells Fargo). During his tenure at First Union, Mr. Friddle was head of the International Corporate Finance group and was a noted advisor for a number of European companies with significant U.S. operations. In early 1988, Mr. Friddle relocated to Duesseldorf, Germany to manage First Union's European operations before returning in mid-1990 to take the helm of the International Corporate Finance team.

Mr. Friddle is a frequent lecturer and panel discussion leader and has lectured at institutions such as the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School and the Tulane University Law School on a number of financial and energy-related topics. He has also filed expert testimony in regards to rate reduction bonds as a staff witness to the LPSC.

Mr. Friddle holds a degree in Business Administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a registered securities professional and maintains his Series 7, 24, 28, 63 and 79 securities licenses. Mr Friddle is active in his community through the Boy Scouts of America and other organizations. He resides in Charlotte, N.C. with his wife and three children.

Mr. Gebhardt is a co-founder and principal of Pathfinder Capital Advisors, LLC and its wholly-owned subsidiary, Sojourner Securities, LLC, (a FINRA and SEC-registered broker/dealer) as well as Pathfinder Renewables LLC. Active in securities and divestiture assignments for most of his career, Mr. Gebhardt is responsible for client deal team and product development at Pathfinder Capital and is one of the firm's chief investment strategists. At Pathfinder Capital (and its affiliates) Mr. Gebhardt has raised nearly $12.0 billion in capital for numerous energy projects.

Mr. Gebhardt was one of the key developer's of Pathfinder Capital's landmark engagement as the exclusive financial advisor to the Louisiana Public Service Commission (LPSC). This assignment required Pathfinder Capital to advise the LPSC on the structuring, marketing and pricing of approximately $1.2 billion of securitized ratepayer-backed bonds (also known as rate reduction or transition bonds) on behalf of Cleco Power LLC, Entergy Gulf States, Inc., and Entergy Louisiana, Inc. These three transactions were completed during 2008.

Prior to establishing Pathfinder Capital Advisors, Mr. Gebhardt was a Managing Director of Banc of America Securities' Structured Capital Markets group (1999-2001), which developed and marketed over $25 billion of complex balance sheet and tax-advantaged transactions.

During his tenure with J.P. Morgan, Mr. Gebhardt initially covered major and independent oil and gas companies and then ultimately coal, minerals and construction companies. He helped establish J.P.Morgan's mergers and acquisitions group for these industry sectors and evaluated numerous project financings (cogeneration, production payment, royalty structures, and chemical and fertilizer plants) as well as general corporate situations. Major accomplishments included the sale of many coal properties including those of Bethlehem Steel in eastern Kentucky, Pittston in West Virginia, and Kaiser Coal/Kaiser Steel in New Mexico and Utah.

Mr. Gebhardt was recruited to Merrill Lynch in 1989 and while working with Merrill Lynch's Project and Lease Finance group, he was involved in a number of structured energy financings including the corporate restructuring of Tucson Electric. However it was within the Global Product Development group that Mr. Gebhardt developed his most-successful product, Trust Originated Preferred Securities ("TOPrS") or Trust Preferred, a security that soon grew into a $200-billion+ market. (These securities became a sought-after financial instrument by nearly all U.S. utilities given that the distributions were tax deductible).

Global Product Development was Merrill Lynch's highly-successful “financial engineering” entity responsible for structuring, developing and marketing new capital markets products to investors in the U.S. and abroad. He personally guided nascent capital markets products through initial accounting, tax, and regulatory opinion reviews, performed stress testing and modeling, assisted the law firms in documentation drafting and the consequent responses to SEC review, marketed the securities and the structures to select clients, assisted with several dozen client rating agency presentations and ultimately represented the structures to the internal sales force and investors. His work also involved activities in a complete spectrum of debt-related products aggregating well in excess of $50 billion (including convertibles and asset-backed SPE's). Mr. Gebhardt's efforts during this time led Merrill Lynch to become the top-ranked underwriter of debt and preferred. Finally, Mr. Gebhardt's experience includes his role as the exclusive financial advisor to Kaiser Steel/Kaiser Coal and Tucson Electric.

Mr. Gebhardt has a B.S. in Chemical Engineering with a minor in Petroleum Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh and an MBA from Carnegie-Mellon University's Tepper School of Business. He worked for two years as a Design Engineer for Union Carbide's Engineering Products and Processes Group. He is a registered securities professional and maintains his Series 7, 24 and 63 licenses. He is married and has one child and lives near New York City.

Mr. Chernoff is a Principal of Pathfinder Capital Advisors and leads the firm's research activities in the energy sectors. Mr. Chernoff has been a noted energy economist and research analyst throughout his career and joined Pathfinder Capital in 2003.

From 1979 through 2003, Mr. Chernoff was a distinguished economist at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), McLean, Virginia. SAIC was (before going public), the largest employee-owned research and engineering company in the US. Mr. Chernoff's areas of expertise include energy economics and finance, alternative transportation fuels and vehicles, R&D program development, energy cost and investment modeling, policy and regulatory analysis, benefit-cost analysis, and socioeconomics. He has performed work for all major Federal government agencies involved in energy, transportation, and the environment, many private energy and transportation companies in the US, Europe, and Asia, and most major collaborative research and policy organizations, including the Electric Power Research Institute, the Gas Research Institute, the American Gas Association, and the Nuclear Energy Institute.

Prior to joining SAIC, Mr. Chernoff was an economist in the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's Office of Electric Power Regulation.

Mr. Chernoff has published numerous articles and reports on energy, transportation, and environmental economics topics; spoken at national conferences organized by the American Gas Association, The Energy Daily, the Department of Energy, the Edison Electric Institute, and the Natural Gas Vehicle Coalition; and has been quoted or cited in most major energy trade publications and journals and many national publications, including The Washington Times and The New York Times.

Mr. Chernoff has a B.A., Economics from the College of William and Mary, and an M.B.A. in Information Management Systems from Marymount University. Mr. Chernoff resides near Washington D.C. with his son.

Sojourner Securities, LLC, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Pathfinder Capital Advisors and a registered broker/dealer.
Sojourner Securities is registered with the SEC and is a member of FINRA and SIPC.

Pathfinder Research provides buy-side research primarily geared towards the hedge fund industry. We do not generally publish our detailed research nor make public our research although we may occasionally publish/post topical research of a more general nature and in support of the theses we develop to guide our sector analyses. Further, commentary from Pathfinder principals is sought by leading investment and industry publications and links to these articles may be found under the "News" link in the above menu.

Pathfinder Research develops trading and hedge opportunities based on information that is often overlooked, misinterpreted, or not adequately followed by other analysts, particularly in regards to smaller companies, companies with little or no institutional following, and companies in distress. By comparison we will spend less time on the widely-followed large-cap energy companies except for distressed security opportunities or unless we develop or interpret new information that may lead to us to a conclusion divergent from the consensus view. In other words, Pathfinder Research operates in a niche where the larger institutions and analysts have no interest or financial incentive to operate.

We do not hesitate to identify, quantify, and comment on overvalued securities and securities that trade with an elevated (and usually underestimated) risk of becoming distressed. Our equal willingness to be positive or negative on a security or company, as the objective analysis dictates, distinguishes Pathfinder Research from a large segment of the advisory business.

Our analysts often focus on the market interpretation of events within the broadly defined perspective of behavioral finance. As a Firm, we do not accept the deus ex machina interpretation of efficient markets and rational expectations and have found (over and over) in our niche that expectations are not rational and that efficiency does not instantaneously and unerringly appear out of nowhere. True trading opportunities require critical analysis employing the correct approaches and correct actions to create efficiency and revise expectations. This is what we do. This is how we excel. And this is why our clients seek our advice.